Shame on You! @ Summerhall

Stripped naked of any theatrical artifice, there is very little to Shame on You! Without any sense of poetry and with the bare minimum of a set it hardly resembles a traditional theatrical experience. Yet in mercilessly stripping itself back, it engenders a zen-like focus on the nature of shame presented with dada-esque charm.  

Performers and creators Trixa Arnold and Ilja Komarov have collected real life anecdotes exploring the nature of shame. They present each story one by one without pageantry, simply reading them off pieces of paper arranged at random. The testimonials are raw and uncensored. Some are tragic, some are funny. One man documents how he is ashamed of hearing the call to prayer whilst having gay sex. Another woman writes about how ashamed she is of her large breasts. Someone describes having an abortion after realising she is not in love with her partner.

The anecdotes are greater than the sum of their parts; when taken together they reveal something universal yet unspeakable about the entanglement of sexuality and morality at the heart of the human condition. Perhaps it is the comfort in knowing that other people can be as depraved, cynical, and nasty as you. Perhaps it is cathartic to learn of others’ misfortunes. But Arnold and Komarov do not claim to provide answers. They only seek to ask.

The random allocation of anecdotes means no two performances will be the same. The performers invite the audience to intervene, ask questions, and read or share anecdotes themselves. It is life itself laid bare. Yet the experience itself is also gloriously alive as a piece of art; malleable, interactive, and confrontational in a way that only theatre can be as an artistic medium. The audience are equals in Arnold’s and Komarov’s eyes, because we are in the same boat asking the same questions and undergoing the same complex emotions. 

The whole experience is like a Milan Kundera novel, the fragmented language and frank explorations of sexuality straight out of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Performed in Summerhall’s Demonstration Room the venue even has something of a Soviet charm to it: dark and dingy with a lingering smell of rust. 

Shame on You! will not work for everyone, but it will reward those who are prepared to strip their emotions bare and embrace the vulnerabilities at the heart of the human experience. 

---

Shame on You!, Summerhall (Demonstration Room), until 28 Aug (not 22), 1.30pm, £10-13